A current trend among enterprises is a continuing effort by such enterprises to cut their costs and to consolidate and/or outsource their account payments processes, for example, to shared service centers. This increase in consolidation and outsourcing account payments processes has created a corresponding need for enterprises to increase controls and to implement additional checks and balances through early warning systems. In the current environment, fraud increasingly presents a challenge for enterprises, and the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) has recommended that transactional risk assessment be implemented.
There is a present need for improvements in enterprise governance models that ensure that enterprises have checks and balances and plans and solutions to manage operational risks. There is also a need to enable financial institutions, such as banks, to provide early warning solutions and risk management tools that assist their clients in improving their governance and likewise managing their operational risks. There is a further need for such early warning solutions that provide, for example, reports of high variances in payment patterns, new payees, high value payments, and uncommon payments. There is an additional need for such warning solutions that perform predictive analyses to identify potential outliers in payment operations and to help enterprises identify any breaks and gaps in their payments processes.